Covet (Clann)

path just inside the clearing. I could have pictured him maybe sitting down on a rock or something, but never lying flat on his back like that. Not even in the clearing.
    “Dad!” I crouched down, shook his shoulder. His head rolled toward me, his eyes wide open and flat with no shine, no hint of that spark I was so used to seeing in them.
    “Dad?” Holding my breath, I laid a hand on his chest.
    Nothing. No rise and fall from breathing. No heartbeat. And he was cold.
    Not wanting to believe it yet, I checked his neck. No pulse.
    “Dad!” I placed both hands on his chest and hit him with a jolt of energy like I’d seen Dr. Faulkner do for Savannah’s grandmother last spring. But the attempt to restart his heart didn’t do anything. I tried again, willing him to blink, breath, gasp, anything. Deep down, though, I already knew it was too late. But I still had to try.
    I lost count of the number of times I tried to restart his heart, until finally I stopped. He was gone.
    Then I saw the punctures in his neck, and I knew, but I didn’t want to believe that, either.
    No way could my dad, the fourth-generation leader of the Clann, be taken out by a vamp. It wasn’t possible. Especially here in the clearing, where he would have been surrounded by some of the most powerful wards in the world. This place was magically designed to protect hundreds of descendants at a time. No vamp could have gotten past the edge of the clearing without a descendant present and consciously allowing them in, the way I had Sav’s dad when we’d returned from France. And even if the wards had failed somehow, Dad was too strong, too skilled with magic. He would have fought, and Emily and I both would have felt that use of power and been able to come help him.
    It had to have been a setup.
    Even as I stared down at his body, at those unblinking eyes, I couldn’t believe he was gone. My eyes burned, my chest so tight I couldn’t catch a deep breath. He was supposed to live forever, or at least until he was eighty or ninety years old. I was supposed to have decades still to learn from him. He was invincible, the single most powerful and magically gifted descendant in the Clann.
    Even though I knew he was gone and couldn’t be saved, I didn’t want to leave him there. But I had to. I hadn’t brought a phone with me, and Dad’s was nowhere in sight. I had to go back to the house and tell Mom.
    Mom.
    I remembered her reaction to the death of her sister. There was no way she was going to be able to handle losing Dad. Once the shock wore off, I didn’t know how I was going to deal with it. It wasn’t real to me yet. I didn’t want it to be real yet.
    I walked back down the path toward the house, across the back yard, the grass crunchy beneath my feet from frozen frost. Too soon, I was on the steps leading up to the kitchen, and then inside.
    “Hey, did you—” At the stove, Mom turned toward me, a metal spatula in one hand, a glass of red wine in the other.
    She took one look at my face, reading the thoughts I was too freaked out to hide.
    She shook her head. “No. He’s too strong.”
    “Mom,” I choked out, slowly crossing the kitchen, the words lodged in my throat and refusing to come out.
    “No,” she whispered, the glass of wine hitting the floor, shattering, spilling red fluid like a crime scene all over us and the tiles and cabinets.
    I tried to hug her, to offer some kind of comfort, knowing she needed me to be strong for her like Dad had been at her sister’s funeral last weekend. But she shoved past me and out the kitchen door, not even taking a coat or the flashlight.
    I had to run after her. She didn’t even slow down when she reached the dark woods. She tripped over a branch on the path halfway to the clearing, would have fallen if I hadn’t grabbed her elbow to steady her. She didn’t say anything to me, just wrenched her arm free and took off running again.
    I shined the light ahead of us just in time before she would have tripped over him.
    She stood there for a few seconds, then a high-pitched wail tore its way out of her throat.
    If the old stories about banshees had ever been true, this is what they would have sounded like.
    She fell to her knees beside him, and it was like reliving that nightmarish day Savannah’s grandmother died in her arms. Once again, I was helpless, useless, without the right words to make this easier for any of us.
    I went to my mother, tried to hug her shoulders, but she shoved